Digital imaging devices are being used with increasing frequency to record digital still images and digital audio/video sequences. Digital multimedia content from other sources is also proliferating, such as digitized consumer snapshots, digitized home video, digitally scanned graphics, digitized music, and other audio recording. With the potential for vast numbers of such multimedia objects to be generated and stored by individuals, the problem of representing a collection of such objects to a user for retrieval and organization becomes important. Typically, a digital camera user takes a plurality of digital images or audio/video sequences that are stored on a removable memory card. These multimedia objects can be transferred from the memory card and stored, for example, on a hard drive or other non-volatile memory associated with the user's computer. Alternatively, digital multimedia objects can be transferred over the internet to a web site for storage, sharing, printing, and other purposes.
Over time, a user can collect hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of multimedia objects, which are records of events at various points in time. As the number of such objects in a particular database grows, traditional methods of displaying them to a user such as in hierarchical file structures or simple “contact sheets” of image thumbnails become ineffective.